Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska

Helena Kowalska was born in Głogowiec, in Poland, on August 25, 1905, the third of ten children in a poor peasant family. She went to school for little more than three years; as a teenager she left home to work as a housemaid, and sent the money to her family. At twenty she joined the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, taking the name Maria Faustina. In the thirteen years she had left she did the humblest jobs: cook, gardener, doorkeeper, in various convents in Poland. In 1934 she began to keep a diary, on her confessor’s orders. It runs to six hundred pages, written in a simple and often ungrammatical Polish by a woman with three years of schooling, and it has become one of the most widely read spiritual texts of the twentieth century. In it she describes her visions of the merciful Jesus and the image she was asked to have painted: the figure with two rays, one red and one pale, and below it the words *Jesus, I trust in you*. That image is found today across half the world. From her come the Feast of Divine Mercy, celebrated on the Sunday after Easter, and the chaplet that bears the same name. She died in Kraków on October 5, 1938, of tuberculosis, at thirty-three. For twenty years her writings were placed on the Index because of translation problems; it was an archbishop of Kraków — Karol Wojtyła — who had them reexamined. As pope, in 2000, he declared her a saint: it was the first canonization of the year 2000. If your name is Faustina, today is your name day.